A few months ago while visiting family in New York, I was walking through Manhattan when a young woman handed me a sample bar of handmade soap. It’s a common marketing tactic to hand out free samples, but in this case it was also a missed opportunity as the execution was poorly done.
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If you want your idea to travel from person to person so it can stick in the cultural consciousness you need people to share your idea with others. It won’t be enough for you to try to tell everyone. You need people sharing your idea for you. The way to get people to spread your message is to tell a good story.
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In order for people to take action, in order for them to share your idea, they need to care about it. That’s where emotion comes in. Emotion elicits a reaction. it makes people act. The emotional component of stickiness is making people care enough to want to share your idea and message.
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Trust is perhaps the biggest barrier to closing a sale online. You can do everything right, but if your customer doesn’t have trust in you at the all important moment of buying, you won’t make a sale. With ideas it’s also important that people believe them. Your audience needs to trust that your message is true. Your idea needs to be credible before it will stick.
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When you convey an idea to an audience you want your audience to receive your message the way it was intended. You want them to understand your message. Otherwise you haven’t really communicated anything useful. If your audience doesn’t understand your idea, the fault lies with you. It’s up to you to make sure they understand what it is you’re trying to say.
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The first step in communicating your idea is attracting attention to it. Someone has to notice your message before anything else. Your idea also needs to hold attention. It needs to maintain the interest of your audience if you want your message to stick with them.
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Creating useful, entertaining, and engaging content on a consistent basis isn’t easy. It’s time consuming. It’s hard to come up with new ideas. What you think will be well-received falls flat. Many people publish content haphazardly. There’s little uniting one piece of content to the next. Without a content strategy you’re throwing content against the wall and hoping it will stick.
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Common advice when starting a business is to uncover a segment of a market and determine what customers want or what problems they’re having and then give it to them. The customer is always right after all. Is this really the best advice?
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In some respects, the business world has never been smaller. High-speed transport links mean goods can be shipped nearly anywhere with speed and ease, while the Internet, theoretically at least, puts a vast new market a mere mouse-click away.
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Every so often the topic of designed by credit links comes up with someone or another deriding the practice and framing it in a negative light. Lat week it was David Yeiser’s turn in his post on Design Intellection, No Credit Here. I want to take the other side and defend the practice, because not only is there nothing wrong with a designed by credit link, it’s actually smart marketing.
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